Recent Progress in Transformer-based Medical Image Analysis

The transformer is primarily used in the field of natural language processing. Recently, it has been adopted and shows promise in the computer vision (CV) field. Medical image analysis (MIA), as a critical branch of CV, also greatly benefits from this state-of-the-art technique. In this review, we first recap the core component of the transformer, the attention mechanism, and the detailed structures of the transformer. After that, we depict the recent progress of the transformer in the field of MIA. We organize the applications in a sequence of different tasks, including classification, segmentation, captioning, registration, detection, reconstruction, denoising, localization, and synthesis. The mainstream classification and segmentation tasks are further divided into eleven medical image modalities. Finally, We discuss the open challenges and future opportunities in this field. This review with the latest contents, detailed information, and task-modality organization mode may greatly benefit the broad MIA community.